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Can't students have a mature discussion over whom they invite to their campuses? Flickr/Walt Jabsco. Some rights reserved.In an article for The Atlantic last week, loosely
framed around the theme of “political correctness”, David Frum, former
speechwriter for President George W. Bush, bemoaned
the apparent increase in recent years of “disinvitation” incidents at US
universities: instances of “attempts by students to ban speakers from campus”
for political reasons. Universities in America have been a battleground for unedifying
and depressingly chronic culture wars since before the 1960s – they were as
much a source of worry for Joseph McCarthy as for Allan Bloom. There they are
considered crucial for understanding the political shape of things to come,
gauging the extent to which the conservative right or liberal left are gaining
ground in a conflict that shows no sign of receding.

Keeping an eye on campus activism must be a joyless, wearying task and
it is at this point that most of us across the pond are likely to feel a little
smug. After all, it is not a huge exaggeration to say that Britain skipped the
culture wars entirely, instead ushering in liberalism with minimum fuss and
discussion, and getting the bulk of it through parliament before The Beatles’
last LP. Nevertheless, there are some twenty-first century civic voices in the
UK who enjoy engaging in a kind of ersatz version of the liberal-conservative
stand-off, presumably wishing they could somehow get involved in – or as angry
about – the real thing. With the absence of any substantive enemy in a society
marked by a relaxed liberal consensus, some people evidently get their kicks
criticising a monstrous tyranny of political correctness that does not actually
exist in British public life.

The hysteria comes to Britain

It should not then be a surprise that British Universities have been open
to some of the same farcical politicised scrutiny experienced in America. On
Friday, The Timesran an
editorial castigating those students and faculty members at the University
of Oxford for their censoriousness. A number of them had signed a letter asking
that the Oxford Union to withdraw an invitation to speak from the leader of the
French National Front, Marine Le Pen. The editorial suggested that the
signatories to the letter should consider whether they were in fact “too
genteel to cope with university life”, that the academy should, above all, “understand
the preciousness of free speech” and that – pace J.S. Mill –
that individuals should be prepared to tolerate views that they find offensive.

This is not an isolated – or even a particularly novel – incident of
people showing distaste for universities debating whether or not to invite
certain controversial public figures to speak. Chaotic scenes visited the
Oxford Union when it attempted to host both David Irving and Nick Griffin in
2007. But, at the moment, a lot seems to be at stake with regards to free
speech and thus the imaginers of political correctness are watching our seats
of learning closely. And so Brendan O’Neill recently wrote a
cacophonous piece for The Spectator, complaining that his
invitation to speak at an Oxford College debate on abortion had been rescinded,
with a hegemonic feminazi thought police denying him a platform to air his
views. (Though curiously, since O’Neill appears to make a living from being
nothing more than an internet troll, it does not seem to have occurred to him
that the students’ change of mind may have been sparked by the realisation that
he is nothing more than an internet troll.)

“Political correctness”

The idea of “political correctness” is, at the best of times, a vacuous
one to invoke in public debate or social commentary. It is always connotative
of the tin-foil hat, of a life being lived in increasingly-less-than-quiet
desperation, of a person who feels cut adrift from the society in which they
live. But when used as a stick with which to beat British universities, it
becomes not only pathetic but dangerous.

As it stands, there is a definite contingent of people in the UK –
including seemingly all mainstream politicians – who have absolutely no idea
what a university is, or what purpose it serves. The main reason for the
confusion is actually the artificial separation of those two qualities: a
proper understanding of a university acknowledges that its purpose simply is its
nature and not anything extrinsic to it. It is thus a catastrophic error to
regard a university as instrumentally valuable, to view it either as a vehicle
for financial profit or a means to achieve social justice. It is neither. It is
rather most appropriately considered an autonomous institution with its own set
of values, which become perverted when they are made subject to undue political
interference.

Universities do many things. Among them, as the philosopher Michael
Oakeshott pointed
out, they protect, nurture and transmit our civilisation and because of
this their value can never be adequately captured by the standards of practical
usefulness. In a sense, universities are civilizations unto themselves. And in
institutional terms, they should be thought of as somewhat akin to city-states
with their own unique practices of governance that reflect their nature and
that should remain immune to political whim. This does not of course mean that
they are above the laws (or even beyond the reproach) of the community of which
they are part. But nor can they be rightly used as a way of measuring the
future democratic health of that community.

British universities have come to occupy a position where young adults
enter a delicate and important stage of their life, poised on the brink of
their entrance into civil society, learning to think for themselves and to take
responsibility for their choices. The higher education “marketplace” enforced
by the UK government has already enabled an infantilising of students, with
several universities now hosting carnival-like open days designed to reassure
parents of the soundness of their financial investment. It is therefore
extremely important that once at university, these students be allowed the
space to maturely enter into their own legitimate and democratic dialogue about
exactly whom they wish to invite and listen to on their campus. Crucially, they
should be able to do this without the wider community denigrating their
deliberations, decisions and subsequent internal protests, without paranoid
outsiders regarding their civic discussions as revealing some kind of mythical
PC herd mentality, simply because they occasionally reach a conclusion that we
would not wish to be transposed to the scale of national politics.

At a time where cartoonists are being murdered by maniacs, it is
obviously tempting to view everything through the prism of free speech. Doing
so, however, merely ends up trampling over our other cherished values and
institutions.

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